The Truth Commission

by Susan Juby

  “Keira’s taking pills,” I blurted. “Drugs.” That was how Brian had found out where Keira lived. They shared a dealer, who had mentioned the crazy artist girl in the almost-empty, new, high-end town house on Prideaux Street.

  My mother stared at her knees. I think she was medicated herself. My dad offered up a smile best described as “cringing.”

  Sylvia was unmoved by this revelation. “If she’s developed a little problem, we’ll send her to rehab. After she finishes the new Chronicle. You’re upset, Normandy. Tell me what we can do for you. I’ve already told your parents that Keira’s going to look after the mortgage.”

  “That book can’t be published. Not with me in it. It shows me getting raped.”

  My dad winced, and my mother looked quickly away.

  “Whose parents are you?” I said, my voice cracking.

  “Normandy,” said my dad. “I’m sure this is all a misunderstanding. A misinterpretation. We want the best for both of you.”

  Sylvia smiled. Her veneered teeth looked like they belonged in the face of a cartoon shark. “The story is fiction. None of the characters are real. I’ve spoken to our lawyers, and they’ve assured me there are no legal grounds for anyone to interfere with the publication of this book. There is a lot riding on it. I think it’s going to be the biggest one yet. Especially with the films.”

  I closed my eyes and felt the throb of blood moving through my brain. I imagined someone playing me on-screen. On countless screens. Or an animated me. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

  “No,” I said simply.

  “I’m not going to argue with you, because I know you’re going to be reasonable once you settle down.”

  “I’m going to contact Mr. Reid’s husband.”

  “Keira wasn’t even there with the teacher on the mountain the day he died. She was making the whole thing up,” said Sylvia.

  I shook my head to clear it. Another lie? I had no idea what to believe. If what Keira had told Sylvia was the truth, I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disgusted. My sister had used Mr. Reid’s accident just like she’d used us. On the plus side, she wasn’t a murderer.

  If what she’d told me was the truth . . . well, that meant my sister was a monster. In that moment, I decided that Keira had told her agent the truth. Because that’s what I wanted to be true.

  “I’m going to tell Mr. Reid’s husband that Keira used what happened to Mr. Reid,” I said after a long pause.

  “Prove it,” she replied.

  I just barely stopped myself from screaming a swear word at the ceiling.

  “I think that’s enough for one day,” said Ms. Fowler.

  “Norm,” said my dad, “things get confusing.” He looked like he wished he was making chili. In spite of everything, my heart hurt for him. I thought of how brutal this was for me, even with all of the support I had. My friends, my teachers. He had my mom, who wasn’t big on coping, and my sister, who wasn’t big on caring about others. And he had me, who had never let on that I wasn’t thriving under current management. My dad wasn’t a bad person. He was just too tangled up to see a way out.

  On that decisive note, the meeting broke up. I never spoke directly to Sylvia again. I doubt I ever will. In the months since that meeting, I haven’t spoken to directly to Keira, either. So many people gone so quickly.

  What happened after that? I moved in with Neil and his dad. Dusk had asked if I wanted to stay with them, but we both knew that her parents weren’t really easygoing, add-another-kid-to-the-mix people. The Suttons had a lot of extra room, and Neil’s dad told me about twenty times how happy he was for me to stay with them as long as I needed to. “Forever, if you want!” he said.

  As Sylvia had promised, my threats and complaints didn’t change Viceroy’s plans. They were going ahead with the new Chronicle.

  So I did what I could to tell my truth. The same day the film option and the publication date for the new Chronicle were announced, I sat down for an interview with Comic, the comic arts and animation journal. I told the reporter what it was like to be the unwilling subject of my sister’s stories. I talked about how those stories had changed our family and partially paralyzed all of us. I told her about the new Chronicle and said I thought Keira had slipped a few gears—the new book wasn’t rooted in any kind of truth. Instead, my sister had played a vicious game with reality to get the images she needed in her mind.

  The article blew up, by which I mean it caused a controversy. My sister didn’t respond, at least not directly. Sylvia issued a carefully crafted press release full of faux regret at the comments of “certain misguided individuals.” It speculated that recent revelations were a result of “ongoing rivalry” and that Keira was not responding directly in order to protect the privacy of her accuser. It was pretty much a masterwork of indirect character assassination.

  Critics and artists weighed in, and there were follow-up articles online and on paper. People took sides. Keira’s most serious fans accused me of being jealous and bitter. Some well-known writers of creative nonfiction said Keira had been reckless and irresponsible in her handling of other people’s stories. Academics began to discuss our family relationship in their classes in the same breath as the conflict between Augusten Burroughs and his adoptive family.116 Libertarians said people should be able to write and draw anyone and anything they liked.

  Some artists thought Keira should be more sensitive and responsible in her storytelling. Some thought she should be allowed free rein.

  It all would have been extremely interesting if I hadn’t been in the middle of it.

  My sister is famous enough and the story was juicy enough that it got picked up by the mainstream press. At least, they tried to pick it up. Reporters from Vanity Fair and Esquire and Maclean’s and the Globe and Mail and the New York Times called and emailed, asking for interviews. Talk show producers called. But I’d said all I wanted to say, and Mr. Sutton and the school directed the reporters to the interview in Comic.

  Keira didn’t respond to any of the commentary. Her silence made me look worse, at least according to people who’d already made up their minds.

  Then Viceroy pushed back the new Chronicle a season. Keira’s fans got the idea that I’d delayed the new book and maybe endangered the movie, and I became the target of their Internet rage. I was the Yoko Ono of graphic novels. Flounder hate sites popped up. My name became synonymous with sisterly jealousy. I pretty much had to get off the Internet, because Keira’s nutbag fans made my life a misery. Then people started to fight back.

  It started, as most protests do, locally. In this case, at Green Pastures. Someone broke into the display case in front of the office and removed the first edition copies of the Diana Chronicles and a self-portrait my sister had given to the school. They were replaced with small figurines of Santa, the tooth fairy, and Pocahontas. Art school. What can I say?

  A few weeks later, Neil directed me to one of the most vicious anti-Flounder sites, the one that had published my name, photo, and all publicly available information, including my old cell number and my parents’ address. Someone had hacked the site and posted illustrations of the site’s previously anonymous author, a guy in his twenties. He was shown in Flounder form. Turns out he didn’t look good as a flounder, either.

  No one at school took responsibility for the start of the Normandy Pale Defense Campaign, but I knew it was the work of Dusk and Neil, then of Aimee, Zinnia, Brian, and Prema. Later, I think a lot of the people in our school joined in. (And I’m told by Aimee, who monitors such things, that it has spread around the world. Team Keira vs. Team Normandy.) I was grateful, but I also know that I will never be totally free of my sister’s stories. I can imagine her turning the whole saga into another Chronicle. And the whole controversy will flare up again when the movie is released.

  But I’d come to terms with the situation, after a fashion. At risk of
sounding like an extremely obvious self-help book, I have no control over what people say and think about me. I’d said my piece and been as honest as I could. I knew what was real and what was lies. Some people would love me and some would judge me based on false information. Life would go on. And, at the risk of sounding like another self-help book, I would take it one day at a time.

  xxxxx

  And what about the Truth Commission?

  It won’t surprise you to hear that, after everything that happened with my sister, Dusk, Neil, and I didn’t have much appetite for formal truth seeking anymore. I feel like I should point out that a project like ours only worked because it took place in our particular school. In another environment, the truth would have been weaponized.

  xxxxx

  You know how in movies there’s sometimes that part at the end when you learn about what happened to all the characters? I love that style of ending.

  Here’s what happened to our Truth Targets as of this writing:

  Aimee Danes continues to monitor her surgeries carefully. She has also begun to produce and star in an investigative webisode series. The first episode was about corruption in the skin products industry. It’s already received 20,000 views. She’s going to be a phenomenal TV reporter.

  Mrs. Dekker has a new dress to go with the yellow sundress. This one has long sleeves and is made of a purple knit material. She’s still into ostriches.

  Zinnia McFarland continues to protest and make good art. She’s going to art school in Berlin in September. Her relationship with her sister is improving. She remains an un-snazzy dresser.

  Prema Hardwick skis like the wind and has two boyfriends and doesn’t care who knows it. We have high hopes for their Olympic prospects, especially Dr. Weintraub-Lee.

  Brian Forbes has disappeared. I hope he’s in a long-term rehab, but I’m not sure. We all miss him. I might try to find him, if he wants to be found.

  Lisette DeVries has turned French, as in French Canadian, rather than Parisian French, as she is at pains to point out. She has joined the Parti Québécois and the school’s French Club. She walks around with a baguette sticking out of her backpack most of the time.

  In April, Tyler Jones unveiled his Senior Year Major Project. Big three-dimensional copper, glass, and tin letters form the word TRUTH. Water pours into the top T, courses through an obstacle course, and then spills out of the H. There’s a pond at the base of the H with some exotic plants growing out of it. Somehow, the water is propelled back up the installation and jets out the top and back over.

  He calls the piece Truthfiltration. In spite of how it sounds, it’s really quite beautiful. The water changes color as it moves through the letters.

  No one knows whether he’s gay or not. Almost everyone’s still hoping he’ll declare for their side. He’s off to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in the fall. Maybe someone there will get to find out.

  His uncle, Officer Jones, is apparently working on a series of gritty watercolors about Nanaimo-style crime and law enforcement. He never did get in touch with me about Keira, but Aimee, who hears everything, told me that my sister had been a nuisance caller to the police station. Apparently, Keira used to complain several times a night about her neighbors making noise. I guess they weren’t as well trained as her family.

  I know I presented my friends’ families as being dysfunctional. Now that I’m living at Neil’s house, I am pleased to report that it’s not true. Admittedly, Mr. Sutton is not a tightly scheduled individual. He works about half an hour a day and makes more money than most people do in a month. This results in a lifestyle and fashion sense of alarming leisure.

  Mr. Sutton, as it turns out, is also a devoted father. He checks Neil’s homework with interest and gives feedback on Neil’s paintings. He and Neil watch movies, mostly from the late 1960s and 1970s, constantly. At Mr. Sutton’s suggestion, we’ve been watching Kurosawa’s Rashomon. It’s about the rape of a woman and the murder of her samurai husband and it’s told from four different perspectives. It’s about truth and how it’s influenced by perception. It’s also evidence that there’s a piece of art to help a person understand any situation, no matter how strange or traumatic. Like I said, Mr. Sutton, though prone to loungewear, is an excellent father. There is a reason that Neil is the world’s best boyfriend. Not long ago, Mr. Sutton helped me to understand some things about Neil’s art.

  “You know, Norm,” he said, spearing an olive out of his martini one afternoon when Neil was staying late at school to paint. “Neil’s work is fascinating. But it’s also sad to me.”

  I waited for him to explain. Part of me was, in spite of everything, still a little jealous or at least curious about Neil’s art. He still hadn’t painted me.

  “His mother was so beautiful. But she was always leaving. From the time I met her until the day she left for good, a few months after Neil was born, she was slipping away from us. It’s why I’ve never remarried. It’s bad enough I have a kid who can’t stop painting disappearing women. No need to add another layer of complication to it.”

  That’s how Mr. Sutton talked. Openly, but not inappropriately.

  It was interesting to watch him try to sort out how best to have me living with them. I basically had my own wing. My bedroom was located on the opposite side of the house from theirs. I had my own bathroom and sitting area and more space than I’d ever had before. I even had my own garden patio.

  I had a walk-in closet. I kept my clothes in it.

  Mr. Sutton handled my living with them by sitting us both down and telling us how he felt, and asking how we felt. And getting us to agree to a clearly outlined set of rules. Reality. What a breath of fresh air.

  xxxxx

  In December, I got a part-time job at the art supply store. I left Nancy at my parents’ house and last month combined all my savings to buy my own car. It’s a Pacer. We call him Ken. He’s got his own kind of cachet and almost never stalls.

  This spring we each finished our Special Projects.

  Dusk finally taxidermied a shrew to her satisfaction. It died of natural causes and was found almost immediately. This is the key, apparently, to a successful mount, which is what taxidermists call preserving animals. Dusk dressed the shrew in a tiny acid-wash jumpsuit, gave it big hair, and installed it in a miniature single-wide mobile home.

  Neil’s paintings revealed themselves to be linked. The women got farther away in each one. The final painting was a close-up of Neil’s face. If you looked, you could see a reflection of the same painting in his eye. There was no woman in it. I’m not completely sure what it means, and that’s okay.

  In addition to my embroideries, a version of this manuscript was displayed with a description written by Ms. Fowler. It was titled Work of Creative Nonfiction by Normandy Pale. No one was allowed to pick it up and read it. I wasn’t quite ready for that.

  Dusk’s parents came to the end-of-year show. They were impressed with Neil’s paintings, and apparently startled by the realism of my embroidery. Several times they commented how photographic it was. Most of all they were proud of Taxiderming the Shrew. Still, they couldn’t stop themselves from pointing out several times that many accomplished artists are also doctors.

  Dusk just shrugged.

  My dad came to the show and looked proud and awkward. No one could say he doesn’t try. He’s giving Mr. Sutton money for my expenses, which Mr. Sutton is just putting away in a college fund for me.

  My sister emailed a month or so ago and said she forgives me for telling those lies about her. I haven’t written her back.

  She’s out of rehab and back in her town house. She splits her time between there and my parents’ house. It makes me sad to realize that my talented sister has chosen to live such a small, mean life. I know how she’s doing because my dad and I get together once a week for breakfast or lunch. We go to a different place
every time, because I think it’s good for him to try new things, and he agrees. We talk about real things, at least we try to. I know my dad didn’t want any of this. He didn’t go along with Keira’s presentation of us so she would pay off the mortgage, or for some other selfish reason. He did it because, he says, he knows how she really feels.

  “She loves us, Normandy. That’s why she draws us.”

  “Do you really believe that?” I asked.

  “I’m her parent, Normandy. I have to believe that.”

  I guess I can see how it would be too much to believe that your own kid sort of hates you.

  The truth, especially for my father, is like an onion. You don’t want to peel that sucker all at once or you might never stop crying.

  My dad says he understands that I’m not ready to come home if Keira’s going to be there. He says he appreciates my courage. He’s thinking about taking an art class at night. Getting back into his model-making. I hope he does.

  I haven’t seen my mom, because she says it’s too painful right now. She hasn’t been going out much since she stopped working, which she stopped doing as soon as the mortgage got paid off. I asked my dad if Keira gave them any extra money. He said it wasn’t important, which means she didn’t. But my mom and I talk on the phone sometimes. If there were prizes awarded for awkward and depressing conversations, we’d need a special trophy case to hold our winnings.

  xxxxx

  So that’s the story of the Truth Commission. Did the truth set me free? Hard to say. I’m struggling for a way to end this story that will sound profound. A sound bite or a memorable Wildean quote.117 Nothing’s coming. That’s kind of the thing about the truth. It’s never complete and it’s rarely simple.118

  Oh, and I just realized I’ve never really explained my embroidery project. The series is called The Corrections.119 It is made up of four separate pieces meant to be displayed together as a single picture. Each shows a section of a family photo taken of us before the first Chronicle was published. When you look at them all together, they still don’t make sense. The pieces don’t fit perfectly together and don’t tell the whole story.